The Complete Union Earth Privateers, page 10
“What can you expect of one born to the lower caste? He does not belong in command, and he will always have something to prove.”
Tessa sighed. Some things were universal, bitching about your commanding officer appeared to be one of them. Her arm brushed against the bulkhead and she froze.
“Did you hear something?”
“Just the engine joining. Stow your gear and come.”
Shit. Her suit had been reading new vibrations but she had hoped it wasn’t the engine. Damn the luck. Aimes beside her was uttering a prayer. Funny, she never knew him to be religious, but it had the sound of something practiced. The deck shuddered beneath her belly as the shuttle spun away from Taru Station out towards space.
A questing hand brushed against hers and she clasped it wordlessly. Tessa was terrified, but she had her rifle, her vacuum suit, and most importantly a marine she’d fought beside for years. Behind the fear, though, she was surprised to find stubborn grit.
Ten thousand years ago the Dirregaunt had been a race of hunters, but despite the effort of the Praetory they’d left that behind when they spread across the stars. She had not. Let them see how humans hunted in the jungles. She squeezed her right hand and felt Aimes squeeze back.
“They’re still after the Condor, Tess,” he said.
“And they’ll find her. Hell if they know where to look they can outrun her and be waiting. Marin doesn’t have a prayer.”
“No, but she has two marines already aboard the enemy ship.”
“And we can cause nine kinds of hell. You think the Dirregaunt share the Malagath fear of space walkers?”
Chapter 6: Conflict of Interest
“Good morning Miss Wong, Director Sampson is in your office.”
Alice Wong paused, steaming coffee halfway to her lips.
“The Director? Did he say why?”
“No ma’am, only to send you straight in when you arrived.”
Alice peered at the door behind her secretary, behind which the director of Union Earth Technology Division waited. Unusual for him to visit the State and Colonization department, UETD barely gave them the time of day. Everyone knew colonization was secondary to scientific and technological advancement. Half his time was spent in the offices of politicians across earth, the rest was spread between the various Union Earth research stations orbiting UE colonies that picked apart tech brought home by the Privateer Corps. He was one of a very select few individuals who warranted a personal ship equipped with a horizon drive. Alice Wong typically had to hitch a ride with a resupply freighter when she visited a colony.
Alice pushed the door open, the sharp click of her heels disappearing on the carpet. Director Sampson stood facing away from her, pensively looking at a photograph he removed from a shelf. She couldn’t tell which one from her current angle. She approached.
“Alice, good morning. Please, come.”
So it was Alice then, not Miss Wong, or Madam Secretary. She was unsure whether to be complimented or insulted. His tone was quite familiar, despite having met her only once before, at the House of Parliament in London.
“Director Sampson,” she said carefully. He smiled, but didn’t correct her or offer her the use of his first name. So, he wanted to establish authority.
He raised the picture. “Your daughter?” He asked.
“Yes, Huian,” she replied, “At her commissioning ceremony when she became an officer in the Navy.” In the picture, Huian stood in her dress uniform, her new rank insignia being pinned to her collar. Alice had taken the picture herself, one of her proudest moments.
“Named for your late husband’s mother, I see,” he said. Retinal implants. Of course he would have them, like all the UEN and UEMC officers. And Huian too, now that she was a privateer. Alice set her tablet on her desk, feeling centuries behind.
Director Sampson continued. “Currently serving with the Vultures. Interesting coincidence. Have you met Captain Marin?”
Alice Wong had. She first encountered Victoria Marin at a christening ceremony whereby the woman got excessively inebriated and groped the assistant head of Colonial Affairs in front of his very scandalized wife. One did not readily forget Victoria Marin. She shuddered to think what habits Huian might be learning on the bridge of the Condor with her, but she had been switched at the last minute from the nice, safe Union Earth Navy billet Alice lined up for her.
“She struck me as a precocious woman, Director.”
“She’s an insufferable bitch is what she is. I feel badly for your daughter, stuck up there with that psychotic drunk. She should never have been given the Condor.”
He raised a hand as if to run it through his silvering hair, but dropped it and replaced the photo. The plastic smile returned as he faced her, deepening the creases at the corners of his eyes.
“Actually, the Vultures are the reason I’m planetside today. How well do you know Taru Station?”
“Taru? We have holdings there, managed by the Jenursa. Outside our normal support network but the privateers have had some success in that region. That whole area is a bit Wild West. Rowdy at the best of times.”
“Rowdy is good, Alice. Rowdy means salvage. Rowdy means advancement for us. So rowdy, in fact, that the Vultures scuttled a Grayling vessel just off the station.”
“What? When?” asked Alice. Her mind immediately went to Huian. She looked at the portrait Sampson had held earlier.
“Don’t worry, your daughter is fine. It happened sometime last night. The Condor repelled an attack and hit back with a solid one-two that left the Grayling ship ballistic towards the first planet in the Taru System.”
Alice let out a relieved breath, but paused. “That sounds like a privateer matter, what does it have to do with State and Colony?”
“Shrewd observation,” countered Director Sampson, “The incident not so much, more about what they’re hauling and what showed up after they hit the dusty before another couple cutters could warm up. Tell you what, it’s easier just to show you. Why don’t you pop open your terminal and take a look-see at your FTL cryptos?”
Alice glanced at her terminal, then back at the director, casually leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He nodded toward the computer on her desk. Alice narrowed her eyes. How did Sampson know what was waiting on her crypto account? She circled around the desk, never taking her eyes off him.
The biometrics recognized her as she sat down, bringing up her personal interface. With practiced ease she navigated the several levels of security required to access the faster-than-light communications while Sampson waited. A flashing alert greeted her. She opened the message, scanned the contents, and gasped.
High Priority Hyperlight Dec 1st
Rec: Sec. Alicewong HT4776782
Send: Cpt. Vicmarin; PVTCondor TRU-STN
Advisement – ferryboat 10 heavy Malagath – FP Tavram aboard pls. advise
Best time - Kallico’rey Malagath base 5 days, hot salvage follows – tech Malagath pls. advise
Advisement – rspns PLM-STN.
Nd
Alice looked at the director in shock.
“The Malagath First Prince? Aboard the Condor? Good God, I can’t imagine the diplomatic nightmare Marin is going to conjure up!” she said. She buried her face in her hands, groaning. Sampson came and sat on the edge of her desk.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, Alice.”
She looked up. “How could it be more complicated than Prince Tavram billeting on that privateer? You know the number of more important names in the known galaxy is down to the single digits, right?”
Sampson leaned forward. “Well, we have some friends owe us favors out that way that clarified the situation a bit. No, can’t tell you how or why, but the skinny is that the ship they rescued the prince from is still on their tail. Now Victoria is tearing a streak across the sky trying to get him home ‘fore the Dirregaunt cruiser on her tail, which she doesn’t know about by the way, catches up.”
“Director we have to warn them, give them a chance to make it to Kallico’rey,” said Alice, for the moment concerned more for her daughter than with the depth of Sampson’s intelligence data. She began preparing a response to send to the Pilum Forel listening post. A thick hand settled on her right wrist.
“Not so fast there, Miss Wong. Relax and take a deep breath.”
“Relax? We have to get the First Prince off that ship, Director. It’s a matter of state urgency.”
There was that smile again, the one that narrowed his eyes. “Not entirely, Alice. Ordinarily, yes, rescues are matters for State and Colony. But in this case Victoria was mistaken in sending this crypto to you.”
“Explain.”
“Word in the stars is the Prince is set on negotiating a peace treaty between the Malagath Empire and the Dirregaunt Praetory. Something somewhere leaked and made someone unhappy.”
“Peace between the Malagath and the Praetory? Think of all the lives that would be saved. Trade would go up, ideas would spread, and the Big Three might not vaporize everything in sight. God, it’s hard to imagine being a part of that universe.”
“Don’t bother trying to imagine it. It’s not a universe the UE wants to be in.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s simple, Alice. The UE runs on stolen tech. You can parade the Navy and the Union Earth Colonies around in front of congress and parliament and the Chinese president, but at the end of the day it’s xenotechnology that keeps us in the black. It’s xenotech that keeps us from getting scraped off the Orion Spur like a bad rash, and it’s the Big Three tearing at each other’s throats that provide us opportunities to salvage that xenotechnology.”
“But most of our salvage doesn’t even come from the Big Three, most of it is other xenos.”
“War creates chaos, creates opportunities for opportunists, and creates desperate people that do desperate things. That chaos goes away and suddenly the galaxy becomes a lot more stable. The Big Three are then actually able to police their territories, proxy wars using the lesser empires become more infrequent, and human advancement dries up, and our progress slows to a crawl unless we start taking measures into our own hands.”
Lesser empires. Lesser than whom? Humanity? Surely not, even Sampson couldn’t be that arrogant. That was how the Big Three described, well, anyone who wasn’t Big Three. Alice had just about enough.
“You want me to give the First Prince to the Dirregaunt cruiser. I won’t do it.”
Sampson frowned. “Alice, Alice, Alice. This isn’t me asking. This is way over both of our heads.”
“Then whoever is ordering it can draft the message, and sign it.”
The director stood up again, walking to the window and looking up at the sky. The sun had yet to rise, and a few stars were still visible in the pre-dawn light.
“She’s out there, you know. The fury of 10,000-year-old hunters is racing to devour her ship.”
“Marin knows what she’s doing.”
“That’s not who I was talking about.”
Alice twisted away from the terminal.
Sampson clasped his hands behind his back and flashed a wolfish smile over his shoulder. “You don’t think it was an accident that Huian was sent to the Condor instead of that cushy billet on the Heinlein do you? That she jumped to the front of the line in front of all those more qualified pilots with prior space time because she was the daughter of the SS&C? That takes a fair amount more clout than you have, Alice. It’s a dangerous galaxy.”
Alice Wong felt a chill creep through her blood. “What are you implying, Director?” she asked, standing.
Director Sampson took a deep breath, turned, and strode to the office door. “Send the damn crypto,” he said, and closed the door behind him. Alice retrieved her tablet from the other side of the desk, and scanned it before sitting down once more at her terminal. She could not afford to hesitate.
“God forgive me,” she whispered as she signed the First Prince’s death warrant.
Would Captain Marin do the right thing?
Chapter 7: Pilum
Victoria sat alone in her stateroom, attempting to concentrate on her latest project by the light of a small lamp; A 23rd century UE destroyer, encased in a glass bottle. She should be sleeping. It had been almost two days since she had slept. Sleeping drugs never seemed to help her insomnia, and she couldn’t drink until she passed out, not with the Malagath aboard. Hadn’t stopped her completely though.
The tiny thruster she was setting fell over within the bottle, and she cursed, pushing away from the desk. The glass case containing the partially constructed model rolled over, fouling her work of the past half hour. She looked longingly at the bed. Four hours still remained before the Condor arrived at Pilum Forel to request permission to transit the galactic territory of the Paralt. Four hours that she didn’t want to spend lying in her rack staring at the blinking light of the command repeater. She tugged a fleece over her uniform and thumbed open the door to her stateroom. The whirring oscillation of the horizon drive greeted her, fueled by the exotic matter they managed to get aboard. Her ship still had its hurts. She had hoped to take a day or two at Taru to refit and repair, but now it looked like the Condor would be limping all the way to the Malagath frontier.
No drugs could make her sleep, but maybe seeing some of the engineering repairs would help. Yuri Denisov could make an atomic war sound dry. She passed the crew’s lounge, wherein she spied two marines and a weapons tech teaching one of the Malagath to play Texas Hold ‘Em. Probably cheating, too. She had expected the Malagath to isolate themselves within their quarters where the atmosphere had been modified to accommodate them, but was more than a little surprised to find that they were integrating themselves with the crew. The privateers of the Condor were no strangers to xeno life aboard her vessel, but the Malagath had a reputation for xenophobia and callous violence that made her assume they would enforce self-segregation. Maybe it was due to their interstellar form of feudal government. Individuals might not be as bad as officers, just trying to get by like the rest of them.
It took her only a few minutes to traverse the length of the Condor and enter the aft engineering bay, crippled since the attenuator overloaded. Inside, her engineers labored to repair the damage with what material was on hand. Yuri Denisov was a deck down, working on the Gravitic Stealth Device. She descended to the lower level and found her chief wearing the far off expression of a man focused on reading his retinal implants. Not one for patience, Captain Victoria waved a hand in front of his face.
He started, focusing on her face.
“Vick, what brings you back to our neck of the woods? Horizon drive giving you migraines again?” Yuri asked. He looked somewhat worse for wear, Doc’s handiwork showed where he had been burned following the attenuator’s overload. A fairly serious burn, from the look of his bandages. His wide pupils gave away the presence of painkillers, and there was a slight slur to his voice. Victoria suspected this might be his last journey aboard the Condor, but he wouldn’t leave while the ship was still hurt. He was one of the original Vultures, with her since she’d taken command.
“Just wanted to see how the repairs were coming along.”
“Not as well as if we had another couple days at Taru, but damned if I want to bunk in a house with a Grayling. The Malagath make up for it, truth be told. Once they dumb down to our level, they soak up engineering know-how like a sponge. I never would have seen them helping us.”
“They like knowing how things tick, us included. Don’t think they wouldn’t strip us apart as fast as any of your equipment if they had the chance. How’s the GSD coming along?”
“Let me just ask my newest engineering team,” said Yuri. He thumbed the engineering circuit on his console, “Cohen, bring the new gal up for a minute.”
Victoria waited while Aesop Cohen ascended from the lowest level, helping one of the Malagath rescues up behind him. Her arm was in a sling. It looked like Doc Whipple had modified the medical gear to accommodate her. She approached behind Cohen, who saluted.
“Captain.”
Victoria ignored him, eyeing the blue-skinned Malagath up and down. She met the eyes of the xeno, so possessing familiar intelligence and yet so alien. The spark of sentience was almost universal, at least for any xeno’s possessing eyes, anyway. Victoria had often wondered if the rescues could detect the same thing, or if they saw her as little more than an animal.
“Yuri, I don’t know if I like her futzing with the Gravitic Stealth Device. That’s classified.”
Her chief engineer laughed, “As if we had any secrets the Malagath hadn’t forgotten before we climbed out of our caves. Aurea has already brought me a laundry list of improvements we can make to it.”
The Malagath engineer stepped forward, “It’s not all that dissimilar to the theory behind the emergency engine employed by the Dreadstar which brought us to your astral territory, Captain Marin,” she volunteered, “Both devices adjust local space-time to create mass. Your device? Negative mass. Our device? Positive, enough mass to initiate a space tear, what your crew calls a horizon jump. Functionally very similar.”
“Cohen?” asked Victoria.
“She’s not wrong, Captain, from the way she’s described it to me. I’ll grant the Malagath version puts out about as much mass as a small star, but they only really maintain it for a fraction of a second.”
“And we would never leave a calculation that important to a computer,” added Aurea, still somewhat scandalized that a species would put such investiture in a technology the Malagath so readily dismissed millennia past as good only for opening doors and displaying documents. Victoria chuffed. If they only knew, she thought.
Victoria left before Yuri could launch into a technical tirade about the GSD, maneuvering her way past two marines on a pair of exercise bikes. Square feet were at a premium, so you shoved workout equipment wherever it could be strapped down. If it wouldn’t jeopardize her command, she would invite one to exercise in her rack. UE protocol was explicit when it came to commanding officers bunking with their crew. Just fore of the engine room were the ship’s command and control center, unmanned for the duration of the horizon jump, and the sensor shack. The sensor shack usually maintained only a single operator when transiting between stars, but she could clearly make out the voice of Dan Avery, her senior sensor supervisor.
